Refined Deformable-DETR for Electric Pylon Detection Based on Optical Satellite Image

Automatic detection of electric pylons in optical remote sensing imagery is important for large-scale powerline monitoring, but remains challenging due to complex backgrounds, small target appearances, and large variations in pylon-shadow structures. This paper proposes a Refined Deformable-DETR framework with a Spatial Context-aware Query Modulation (SCQM) module to enhance object query representations. SCQM aggregates image-level contextual information from encoder memory and generates channel-wise modulation vectors to recalibrate object queries before deformable cross-attention, thereby providing image-conditioned channel priors for subsequent query-feature interaction. Experiments on the self-constructed Electric Pylon Remote Sensing Dataset (EPRD) show that the proposed method improves AP from 72.7% to 74.1% and APs from 47.2% to 50.9% compared with the baseline Deformable-DETR. Evaluations on the public Electric Pylon Dataset (EPD) further demonstrate its generalization capability. These results indicate that context-aware query modulation is effective for Transformer-based electric pylon detection in complex remote sensing scenarios.